THE banks of the river Sabarmati secrete the space that thousands of labouring people have produced. This is the space of densely packed huts, rickety bamboo, and plastic shelters of thousands of women and men who have built history, a morphology of existence scoured from the bowels of the wasted sandy banks which were of no use to anyone.

This is a space teeming with life, bustling with activity, deeply etched with back-breaking labour that has produced existence out of nothing. As the labourer built her shed, tended her goats, and pickled her lemon, she produced space, existence, and history.

In other spaces in the city, the slum-dwellers earn a living as domestic helps, vendors, auto-rickshaw drivers, and mechanics, forming an informal labour force. The city needs its informal labour force to subsidise a formal labour force that works in banks, schools, small businesses, consultancy firms, and government offices. It would be impossible for the city’s middle and upper classes to accumulate salaries, profits, bonuses, and dividends if the informal labourers from the banks of the Sabarmati did not sell their labour for wages below their subsistence level.

Informal sectors in Ahmedabad city, like informal sectors everywhere, are notoriously exploitative with long hours of work, no prescribed minimum wage, no regulated breaks or holidays, no sick leaves, and no maternity compensation. Laundering, cleaning, dish-washing, vending, and rickshaw-pulling are backbreaking work, and more and more displaced rural labour are pushed into these kinds of work as they are forced into urban informality every day.

With fast-shrinking formal sectors — more than 100 textile mills, which were the mainstay of Ahmedabad’s economy, closed down in the 1980s — about 100,000 workers were displaced from urban manufacturing and dumped into the swelling informal sectors. A large supply of informal labour and high levels of unemployment push informal sector wages below subsistence.

In spite of being super-exploitative and affording wages below subsistence, the informal sectors are still able to attract workers; the entire populace of the banks of the river Sabarmati (almost 30,000 families) are desperate enough to work in the informal sectors. The people of Sabarmati are estranged from their labour, alienated from the right to produce as a conscious life activity. Instead, they must produce to earn a living; however, the informal wages do not even suffice to earn the equivalent of what is necessary to keep alive. The labourer is not only estranged from the act of labouring, but this estrangement does not enable him / her to subsist.

It is this estrangement of the informal labour inhabiting the banks of the Sabarmati at below subsistence rates that allow the middle and upper classes to keep the accumulation process rolling. In other words, estranged labour embodied by the slums of the river Sabarmati levers the accumulative engine of the city.

The banks of the river Sabarmati consisted of wet sand and pebble; the river runs dry most of the year, exposing wide flat floodplains that formed the river’s natural physiography until they were claimed and transformed by poor people and migrants who could not afford to live anywhere else. The informal sector jobs that form the mainstay of the urban poor produce below-subsistence wages, which means the informal labourer is unable to pay for both rent and food. So, they pay for food and claim the banks of the river, which no one used, because they were badlands. The informal labourer who produced space from the dirt of the banks of river were displaced people, migrants who moved from rural areas of the same or neighbouring states.

An accumulation process set in motion in rural areas in India led to the expulsion of a host of people originally tied to land. Their forced displacement from land resulted in their extreme immiserisation and pauperisation, and they moved to the city not to be absorbed as an industrial proletariat “free” to sell their labour for wage.

The mills of Ahmedabad indeed did not absorb the rural migrants; most had closed down since the 1980s. In the midst of a post-colonial indigenous capitalism stunted by forced liberalisation of the economy, the pauperised migrants could only be squeezed into the informal interstices of the city’s economy. Because of their estrangement from their labour in the informal sectors where super-exploitation kept the wages below subsistence, the labourer was compelled to produce an existence along the banks of the Sabarmati.

The banks of the Sabarmati are, therefore, not just slums, not just a few ragtag makeshift shelters, filthy from the lack of basic infrastructure and placed helter-skelter, but they chalk morphology of existence that secretes a spatial history of production of life from sandy wastes and useless pebbles which were claimed by no one.

The geology of the slums not only represents densely packed homes separated by thick networks of very thin lanes, but it also represents a deep sedimentation of layers of caste and religious affiliations distinctly striated to mark zones of communitarian differences, carefully preserved to reflect the spatial morphology of the rest of Ahmedabad and India. Unlike Marx’s vagabonds who had no right to migrate through space, the inhabitants of the Sabarmati are not beaten up, nor are their ears sliced off for daring to produce space in the heart of the city: they are to be simply displaced, yet again.

Displacement is assumed to be engraved in their genetic code and the ecology of the city depends on this. About 30,000 families must be estranged from the spaces of their making to be randomly located at the discretion of urban authorities through an impartial process of rolling the dice. The spaces freed from the estrangement of informal labourers will be accumulated by a class of political elites who will then erase the sedimentation of “poverty, filth, and ugliness” and convert the banks into plots with a high floor space index so that they are attractive to global investors who can plan skyscrapers. The SRFD will thus be a “self-financing project”: 20 per cent of the land will be sold as square footage to private developers to recover some of the costs. The builders are allowed to use the square footage according to their discretion with a very minimum compliance with the master plan.

Dirt, sand, and pebbles transformed into spaces of existence will now be estranged into flat square footages that represent big money. This spatial estrangement will crystallise a process of neo-liberal accumulation, where a new urban politics of municipal neo-liberalism will locally fix global investment and, hence, inject globalisation into the very silt of the river Sabarmati. The class of politicians, business elites, corporate builders, multinational corporations, and global investors will accumulate space and convert it into capital frozen in skyscrapers, IMAX theatres, malls, gardens, water parks, so that the city of Ahmedabad can be globalised.

Excerpted with permission from:

Displacement, Revolution, and the New Urban Condition: Theories and Case Studies

By Ipsita Chatterjee, Department of Geography, University of North Texas

2014 / 180 pages / hardback: Rs 645 (9788132116608) / SAGE Publications